Calibrated Russian Topos of Africa for Mac & PC

[gjackson]

The old Soviet 1:500,000 topos of Africa have been a great resource for overlanders for a long time. They are exceptional maps if you can get passed the cyrillic. When I used them in Africa they were only calibrated for Ozi (PC), and I had to manually calibrate each map in GPSY before I could use it. Now MadMappers has posted the full set re-projected in WGS84 and border clipped for easy stitching. Best of all MacGPS Pro can open these maps with no problem and recognizes the calibration!

North africa (334 maps):
http://www.madmappers.com/mapset.php?MS=182

Southern Africa (181 maps):
http://www.madmappers.com/mapset.php?MS=183

Included a screenshot of one of the later (1989) maps open in MacGPS Pro.

cheers

[cruiser guy]

These look like just what one needs for travel in Africa but how do you know what it says especially if you don't read Russian or Cryllic or whatever it is.

[AlexJet]

Actually it's not that difficult to read.
I did also seen in many sources that one of the best topo maps were Russians. Russia spend allot of money developing maps while America went with GPS. Now both worlds combine their knowledge.

[cruiser guy]

Actually it's not that difficult to read.

How about some hints then? What I'm looking at in Cryllic doesn't look anything like English to me! I can't even begin to imagine how they are similar.

They open and are calibrated just fine in OziExplorer by the looks of it.

[Sirocco]

Fantastic stuff. Detailed mapping of Africa for free. T4A stuff is supposedly good in the Southern half of Africa but the data is sparse in the north.

Graham, do you know if these maps will work through Fugawi? I have mapsource on this laptop, but dont think it will work. Waiting on my HP tablet to turn up before i install Fugawi on it and try it out. Its going to be my dedicated unit for overland/greenlane use running Memory map, Fugawi and Mapsource :) cant wait.

G

[craig]

I'm a map geek and always love finding new to me map collections. They just appeal to me. On that basis these are really cool. But...

These are at 1:500k? Isn't that scale a bit course for reliable off-highway navigation? For comparison, USGS Topo maps that most US citizens are familiar with for hiking/offroading are mapped at 1:24k.

[Sirocco]

Its a fair point Craig. We use 1:25 and 1:50 here in the UK, both of which are excellent.

North and West africa by comparison are relitively featureless (I cannot comment on south/east) so a larger scale is not such a big deal. Apart from these maps most others are 1:1mil... now thats some tough navigation!

Imagine trying to cross Africa on a series of 1:25k? Thats a lot of paper!

G

[cruiser guy]

These are at 1:500k? Isn't that scale a bit course for reliable off-highway navigation? For comparison, USGS Topo maps that most US citizens are familiar with for hiking/offroading are mapped at 1:24k.

Yes, but maps from other parts of the world can be hard to find in the best of times. I'd be willing to bet that for 99% of cities in Africa a map does not exist!

I lived in Guatemala for 5 years and never found a good map of the city. You slowly learned the main roads and went out from there.

Any ideas for translating Cryllic?

[xr8dxj]

Ummm... so what would be a good program to view these on a PC? Sorry I'm a newb to this.

[luangwablondes]

You need mapsource to use T4A. There is a link for free software. And then just update it.

What you can do, is see if Madmappers has topo maps of the countries you are going to, and use them as a layer in Google Earth. Then you would have that and the free T4a roads and tracks layer to use in GE. I did that with Zambia. It is time consuming to set up.

[craig]

Its a fair point Craig. We use 1:25 and 1:50 here in the UK, both of which are excellent.

North and West africa by comparison are relitively featureless (I cannot comment on south/east) so a larger scale is not such a big deal. Apart from these maps most others are 1:1mil... now thats some tough navigation!

Imagine trying to cross Africa on a series of 1:25k? Thats a lot of paper!

G

So many maps is why a laptop based product makes sense whether it be Overland Navigator, Ozi Explorer, or any of the others out there. Wish I had an Overland Navigator map-pack put together for Africa but the US alone is a formidable task for one person.

Craig

[gjackson]

Look at what T4A does. They involve the overland community in mapping, and have a phenomenal product because of that. It would be neat if someone here could do something similar.

www.tracks4africa.com

[luangwablondes]

With MAPA's additions to the T4A map last year, covering Southern and East Africa, and this year, their mapping of the parks and conservation areas in West Africa, the T4A map coverage is excellent for the average overlander. They are continually updating and adding information to the map--- it isn't just about gpsr accurate roads and tracks.

A measure of their quality and success, are the copycats using T4A maps as their own and repackaging them under their own label. Yep, lots of copyright infringements.

[redbeard]

http://africamap.harvard.edu/ also has some of these same sources listed.

I cant seem to download many of the maps from the madmappers.com site. anyone have any luck with this?

[gjackson]

I got the whole set down, but that was back when I made the original post. Haven't checked it lately.

cheers

[redbeard]

Well, I'm not talking about the Russian topos. If you browse through some of the individual countries list, there seems to be some stuff at 50k and 250k scale from some of the countries. I did previously get a set of 50k and 250k for South Africa, but the rest of Africa I'm still looking for.

[luangwablondes]

Well, I'm not talking about the Russian topos. If you browse through some of the individual countries list, there seems to be some stuff at 50k and 250k scale from some of the countries. I did previously get a set of 50k and 250k for South Africa, but the rest of Africa I'm still looking for.

Contact MadMappers directly. They helped me with some topo maps a few years ago. Quite helpful.

[craig]

Look at what T4A does. They involve the overland community in mapping, and have a phenomenal product because of that. It would be neat if someone here could do something similar.

www.tracks4africa.com

Graham,

Have a look at Openstreetmap.org. It includes pavement, dirt, biking, biking, hiking, and ferries. It aims at being an open source Navtech replacement. Great project, with all sorts of tools, developer, and geospatial professionals supporting it.

Craig

[redbeard]

How about some hints then? What I'm looking at in Cryllic doesn't look anything like English to me! I can't even begin to imagine how they are similar.

They open and are calibrated just fine in OziExplorer by the looks of it.

Found a couple links....
First is a US Army guide to the Soviet maps.
Second is some site, might be the same stuff.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/pdf/soviet.pdf
http://rkkaww2.armchairgeneral.com/maps/keymap/mapkey.htm

[geovalue]

We have just completed driving 80,000km around Africa. We used 2 mapping systems. Tracks4Africa is excellent if you stay on their routes. It is especially good for southern and eastern Africa but limited for North and West Africa.
We used the Operational Navigation Charts (ONC) maps prepared by and published by the USA Defence Mapping Agency now publicly available through several distributors and everything is in English. Each required map was scanned and digitized and loaded into our laptop with the appropriate file format. We used Memory Map as the software package which has a calibration module and is very user friendly, easy to use and compatible with Garmin. Using the 2 systems gave us complete coverage of Africa. The ONC maps were amazing accurate and allowed us to navigate safely through very remote areas. If anyone is interested in more details they can contact us.
There is some more information available on our website

Janet

[JRhetts]

These look like just what one needs for travel in Africa but how do you know what it says especially if you don't read Russian or Cryllic or whatever it is.

If you look on the Madmappers web site they offer a Cyrillic 'decoder' sheet. This will not make use totally easy, but you can avail yourself of this tremendous resource. Click on one of the blue "more details' buttons, and it will get you there. [I am appending a low res screen shot to this post.]

Just this evening I downloaded several maps of Liberia, where I spent 5 years in the 1960's - before the civil war - and i can report that these maps are pretty damn good for even such an out of the way place as Liberia. Wow did the memories come flooding back about making our way to places we knew only the name of and had NO maps whatsoever at the time. Sure would have loved to have had these!!!

gjackson, thanks so much for posting this resource.

[isaac]

Reading Russian is easier than it looks at first glance! I learned in a few weeks in high school, and can still parse Cyrillic street signs* 20 years later despite never having learned to speak Russian per se.

Especially if you don't need to know vocabulary, just sound out the phonetics for locals, enough that people recognize town names and correct your pronunciation (or so you can cross-reference between a Russian map and English book etc.). I would be happy to organize an hour-long course on this for next year's Overland Expo, or find the right pro teacher. It might be interesting to have a whole curriculum of language primer classes or foreign-language maps by continent etc.

Cheers - Isaac in SF

* By the way, if you learn the Cyrillic letters you can unpack other languages too, like Greek, enough to find useful stuff like this:
http://cache.virtualtourist.com/1/2928041-Farmakeio-Athens.jpg

[evldave]

I would be happy to organize an hour-long course on this for next year's Overland Expo, or find the right pro teacher. It might be interesting to have a whole curriculum of language primer classes or foreign-language maps by continent etc.
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We did this where I work...we have a lot of world travelers for business, so set up a bunch of 1-3 hr 'Business language and ethics' classes...French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian pretty much covered it for us, and people could basically spend a day learning the basics of what they needed - we also included customs, which would be helpful in an expo-related course.

We were lucky in that we had staff from those countries come around a lot, plus a very multicultural local staff, so it was easy to get lecturers...I'm sure you can find the same at the Overland Expo to set something up.